


Wake-up Call

by hophophop



Series: Things Said & Unsaid [5]
Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 12:05:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2772377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hophophop/pseuds/hophophop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"It's gonna hurt for a while. You have to let it."</em> </p><p>Like Sherlock, as adept at committing crime as he was deducing it, her ability to find things reflected an equal ability to hide them. Nobody knew what she was going through, and nobody was going to find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wake-up Call

Joan set the cardboard box on the bed and glared at it, defeated. She only escaped being 20 minutes late to meet Marcus that morning because he’d been stuck in a traffic jam affecting seven blocks in three directions, involving a giant RV, a garbage truck, and a stalled Honda, if she recalled his rant correctly. His irritation over that fiasco filled the short time left before getting on with work, and she retreated home fifteen hours later with the veneer of her professionalism intact even as the core of it continued to disintegrate. She blamed the subway for a missed meeting the week before, and she’d arrived at two crime scenes recently without having had time to review the latest materials beforehand.

It hadn’t been a problem for the first three months: the novelty of a new apartment, new neighborhood, and new work arrangement distracted her unconscious, and the insomnia stopped. Well. That is, it wasn’t a problem for those three months _after_ the she got over the initial shock. Shocks. That first morning she’d known he was gone. Not that he was _gone_ gone, she didn’t know that yet. But the house was still in the way it could only be when Sherlock was absent. When she found his note— After that, she spent a week sorting through her storage unit and a second doing it again, paring down her past to its barest essentials. Minimizing what baggage she could, and spending as little time in the brownstone as possible.

Those two weeks were not what she’d call restful; despite the quiet solitude she barely managed to sleep three consecutive hours most nights. If she wasn’t plagued by kidnappers and dying patients, she was jumping at every creak and mumble an indifferently maintained hundred-plus-year-old building could make, thinking someone else was there. By the end she didn’t much care if it was another attacker or prodigal Sherlock; both were equally disruptive as phantom entities. It produced an agony of emotional tumult she couldn’t control, and that lack of control was itself another layer of agony. She hated it, and since she wasn’t sure she could conceal it, she hid.

She’d already told Gregson that Sherlock had gone to England; it was a relief when he assumed it was for Mycroft’s funeral. She followed up by lying about visiting family herself while he was away. And then it was easy enough to let them know he’d decided to stay on a while, been recruited by MI6, and let them make whatever assumptions they wanted to make about that. The tone of her voice warned them off asking more questions.

Once she’d “gotten back” and mentioned her decision to downsize living quarters, Marcus offered to help her move. She postponed replying to his text for hours. Could she hold herself together? Make it a test? She had so little at the brownstone itself, and she realized it would just be going from storage to the new place. One storage unit to another, really. She’d learned her lesson: the only _sanctum sanctorum_ she could rely on was inside her own head. ( _So you think you’re reliable,_ the voice inside scoffed.) No place was safe, not in this world. She sent Marcus the address of the locker and started practicing her game face. This was good. A new start. A clean slate. She’d buy him a beer afterwards, talk about baseball. Normal stuff. He’d see through some of it, sure, but not all. Like Sherlock, as adept at committing crime as he was deducing it, her ability to find things reflected an equal ability to hide them. Nobody knew what she was going through, and nobody was going to find out.

And so those first three months, once she’d patched herself up and found new neutral space and rebuilt the fortress around her memories of those last weeks, those three months were exciting. She could be anyone again, continue what she liked — consulting with the NYPD — and start fresh with everything else. No reason to look back. Living alone was refreshing. So pleasant not to come home to the unexpected like the leftovers she was planning to eat already consumed (or experimented on), her weekend plans upended by somebody signing them up for a new case, or the acrid smell of things being burned that should not have been. Nobody else’s dirty dishes. A bathroom to herself again oh god how she missed that. Everything was left where she put it, where she liked it. Just her and Clyde. She didn’t miss the surprises at all.

There were no surprises, these days.

So it was a great start, and after a few concerned looks and one suddenly cut-off conversation when she turned the corner at the station from the coffee machine, neither Gregson nor Marcus mentioned her former partner outside of reference to some old case. A good half of the other detectives and cops at the station met her eyes with a nod or a smile once the expectation of a stray insult or condescending correction in her vicinity faded. Few people missed Sherlock, it seemed. Or at least none that chose to comment so to her. The thought she was being coddled was an irritant, but she chose to imagine it was simple relief. The department’s rate of closed cases decreased slightly over those three months, but it was holding steady now. Not as high as when they had two consultants to help, but not so low that she had anything to feel embarrassed about. Not when department morale increased a notch at the same time. She was good for them. Joan Watson, alone, was good. Some might even say better.

Maybe she started to feel comfortable. Not complacent; the work was too exhilarating and the stakes for the victims and their families too high for her ever to take it for granted. But her unconscious must have gotten agitated when she stopped being quite so anxious about whether this new life would work. Maybe it was hormones. Or the moon. Didn’t matter why. Three months into her latest new life, and the last one rose up from the depths she’d consigned it, to demand attention.

Disrupted sleep, just like old times. If she fell asleep before 2am, there would be nightmares waiting. If she stayed up, she’d crash between 3 and 4 and sink deep for an increasingly unpredictable time. Two, three, five hours of oblivion. She’d have to fight to wake up, feel groggy and slow for another hour or two. She’d drop things, lose concentration, miss details or flat out misunderstand what she read. Had to talk herself out of self-diagnosis of poison-induced dementia—

(and oh that case with the geneticists, horrible in its details but what had once been such a fond memory, a highlight— The sheer joy she felt that week! It made her throat clench and her eyes burn, remembering now.)

—Simple sleep deprivation explained it all, with a dash of PTSD, yes, she knew that, thank you very much. She just wasn’t going to follow any of the recommendations for treating it, all right? She wasn’t harmed, it’d been barely 48 hours, and if she was a pawn in a game over which she had no control, her captors didn’t behave all that badly for not caring one whit about her long-term welfare. But people would make a fuss, and there was the matter of sworn secrecy and international security, and it was so tangled up in other things it had nothing to do with… She just had to endure. And treat the symptoms so she’d be able to keep her job and her self-respect.

She took a breath and flipped up the box flaps to rummage inside with both hands, retrieving her quarry. She plugged the one in next to her dresser and held the other, slowly turning around to find a good spot for it. She had to get more batteries; these had run down long ago. She’d been happy about that when she finally noticed back then, secretly pleased it wasn’t necessary — she certainly never shared that development with certain parties who had a hair trigger for I-told-you-sos — and had tossed the dead appliance into the box at the back of her closet. That sudden flash of memory bit hard. Looking at what she held now, her eyes threatened to tear up again, and she stomped over to the kitchen island and slammed the alarm clock on the counter. She needed orange juice anyway, orange juice and paper towels. And batteries, dammit. So what if she needed goddamn batteries, couldn’t trust herself to get up on time, couldn’t trust—. She grabbed her wallet and keys, pushing the sense of failure back behind the fortress walls. Lots of people needed alarm clocks. It was _normal_. It didn’t have to mean anything, and it didn’t have to remind her of anything. It was just a fucking alarm clock.

She stubbornly ignored her flinch at the _bang_ when the door slammed behind her.


End file.
